Thomas J. Webb’s Ecology Blog

Oftentimes, I’ll have ideas about aesthetics that are generic and can apply to any art form. Some principles apply to any art, especially with regards to the appeal aspect. I’ve done posts on this before, but for now on, they’ll all be posted in “art principles”. It’s my nature as a programmer to find patterns. Write generic templating code and implement specifics later…
People like things that are like people, like an individual:

• Is complex. A good [movie] can be watched repeatedly and you find something new on each watch. Some things will always be mysterious, just like a person always dies with secrets. It’s a mistake to think that little unnoticeable things themselves make something more appealing. Rather, knowing that such things exists is enough to make it more appealing. (more…)

A few hours ago, I took the trash out, and had to dump collected weeds out of one of the cans. It has been raining slightly the past few days, so a sort of tea was created in the bottom of the can. The smell was a concentrate of the natural smells I expect from the area, disarming me with an overpowering version of what are usually pleasant smells.

This is the component of a sensory experience that one might mistakenly see as not changing the nature of it - intensity. Louder music isn’t the same music, but louder. It’s different music. A “pleasant” smell is so often nothing but a subtle smell and the opposite with bad and pungent smells. A woman who, noticing her perfume smells good, decides to bathe in it, and your typical modern sound mastering engineer who obsesses with making music loud neglects this fact.

Oh yeah, and how good coffee tastes is well correlated with how hot it is, but that actually has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here.